REDCAT and Dance Camera West Co-Present DANCING ON SITE AND ON CAMERA 11/4

REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) and Dance Camera West co-present Dancing on Site and on Camera, A conversation and screening with Joanna Haigood, Stephan Koplowitz and David Rousseve at REDCAT on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 8:30pm.

How does site--a particular natural, architectural or cultural environment--inspire dance? How can film document the process and product of site-specific dance? Alpert Award-winning choreographers Joanna Haigood, Stephan Koplowitz and David Rousseve carry out a lively discussion about their practices and their far-ranging experience with the intersection of site-specific choreography and media, as demonstrated in film and video works screened by each of the three artists.

Joanna Haigood is artistic director of San Francisco's Zacho Dance Theater; Stephan Koplowitz, based in Los Angeles, is currently directing the touring company TaskForce, which completed a residency in Plymouth, England, this summer; and David Rousseve, also based in L.A., directs REALITY, a dance theater company that is now touring a work called Saudade. The panel is introduced by CalArts President Steven D. Lavine and moderated by Irene Borger, dance ethnologist and director of the Alpert Awards in the Arts.

Part of REDCAT's conversation series, Dancing on Site and on Camera is funded in part with generous support by The Herb Alpert Foundation. The Alpert Awards in the Arts, a fellowship program that supports innovative practitioners in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater and visual arts, are administered by CalArts on behalf of The Herb Alpert Foundation.

JOANNA HAIGOOD moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from New York in 1980 and co-founded Zaccho Dance Theatre. Her creative work focuses on making dances that use natural, architectural and cultural environments as a point of departure for movement exploration and narrative. Haigood's work involves in-depth research into the history and the character of sites and typically integrates aerial flight and suspension as a way of expanding the dancers' spatial and dynamic range. Her work has been commissioned by leading arts presenters both nationally and internationally. Among them are the National Black Arts Festival, Festival d'Avignon and Festival d'Arles in France, the Exploratorium, Capp Street Project, Dancing in the Streets, the Walker Art Center, Jacob's Pillow, the San Francisco Art Commission, Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, New York City Center and the McColl Center for Visual Art. Her choreography has also been commissioned by Alonzo King's Lines Contemporary Ballet, Robert Moses' Kin, Axis Dance Company and is in the repertory of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago.

STEPHAN KOPLOWITZ is an award winning director/choreographer/media artist internationally known for his work on the concert stage and for creating original site-specific multi-media works for architecturally significant sites. His site work aims to alter people's perspectives of place, site, and scale, all infused with a sense of the human condition. Since 1984 he has created 57 works and has been awarded 41 commissions. He is the recipient of a 2004 Alpert Award in the Arts (Dance), a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography in addition to a 2000 New York Dance and Performance Award, "Bessie" for "Sustained Achievement" in Choreography. Koplowitz is also the recipient of six National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowships from (1988-97). In 1996, his site-specific work Genesis Canyon commissioned by the Dance Umbrella Festival, for the Natural History Museum in London won Time Out Magazine's Award for "Best Dance Production of 1996". He has created site-specific works for New York's Lincoln Center (2001), the internet based Webbed Feats New York's Bryant Park (1997), the British Library (1998), a coal processing plant in Essen, Germany (1999), and the windows of Grand Central Terminal. In 2007, he was commissioned by Summers Stages Dance to create a site-specific work for the newly opened Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston. The work, (iseea), was named one of the best dance productions of 2007 by the Boston Globe. He is currently touring with his site company Stephan Koplowitz: TaskForce, which has performed in Idyllwild and Los Angeles in 2008 and Plymouth, UK in 2009. After working and living in New York City for 23 years, Koplowitz, in 2006 accepted the position of dean of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts.

David Rousseve, a choreographer, writer, director and performer, is a magna cum laude Graduate of Princeton University (Politics, Theater and Dance, and African Studies). Roussève is Artistic Director/choreographer for REALITY, a New York based multi-racial dance/theater company of seven performers that grew to become one of the most important voices in contemporary American dance. Commissioned three times by the Brooklyn Academy Of Music's Next Wave Festival, the company also toured throughout the US, Europe, Great Britain, and South America. Among others, Roussève has also created new works for the Houston Ballet, Ballet Hispanico (in collaboration with Salsa great Eddie Palmieri), the Atlanta Ballet, and Denver's Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Theater. Recent projects include a 2006 collaboration with Ilkhom Theater Company of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the 2005 dance film Bittersweet (directed, written, and choreographed by Rousseve) and a 2005 joint premiere for two Cleveland companies: Dancing Wheels and Cleveland Contemporary Dance Theater. In 2009 Roussève premiered the REALITY evening-length work Saudade which then toured throughout the U.S. including performances with UCLA Live. His awards include the 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2006 Creative Capital Fellowship, a 2000 New York Dance and Performance Award ("Bessie"), a 2000 L.A. Horton (dance) Award, 1999 and 2001 Irvine Fellowships in Dance, a 2000 California Arts Council Choreography Fellowship, the 1996 CalArts/Alpert Award in Dance, "First Place Screen Choreography" at the IMZ Int'l Dance Film Festival, and seven consecutive fellowships from the NEA. As a writer Roussève was published in Bantam Press' Rants and Raves from Today's Top Performance Artists, Rutledge Press' Envisioning dance on Film, and in 1997 and 2002 he was selected as a screenwriting Fellow in the highly competitive Sundance Screenwriter Lab. David Roussève is Professor of Choreography and former Chair of UCLA's World Arts and Cultures Department.

REDCAT (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) opened by CalArts in 2003, introduces diverse audiences, students and artists to the most influential developments in the arts from around the world, and gives artists in this region the creative support they need to achieve national and international stature. REDCAT is the newest partner in an international network of adventurous art and performance centers, which together are playing a vital role in the evolution of contemporary culture. REDCAT is a center for experimentation, discovery, and lively civic discourse.